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Awards & Nominations

This week, I join Grace Duffy, Ronan Doyle and Jay Coyle to discuss the week in film news. As the first podcast we’ve recorded in three weeks, since the end-of-year spectacular back in December, there is a lot to talk about. And so we do! Everything from T2 Trainspotting to Bird Box to Bandersnatch to The Dead, it’s an eclectic selection of films. It includes some of the new releases that we didn’t get to cover over the break, including Life Itself and Welcome to Marwen.

In the meantime, the Online Film Critics’ Society have released their end of year awards. Thrilled to be a part of the group, who are voting on films released internationally during the calendar year of 2018. As such, it will be a different pool of films than the Dublin Film Critics Circle awards.

The arrival of “Storm Emma” and the “Beast from the East” ensured one of the most memorable Audi Dublin International Film Festivals in recent memory. Myself, Jason Coyle and Ronan Doyle took a bit of a breather in the middle of it all to talk about the best of what we’d already seen, what we thought would win at the Oscars, as well as the usual trip through the weekly top ten and the new releases.

I’m actually reasonably happy with Argo winning Best Picture. I’ve given up on the idea of the Academy Awards ever mirroring my own tastes, and Argo is a pretty great film from a director who is developing into a wonderful talent. And the awards last night spread the love around. It’s hard to hate a ceremony that can give Quentin Tarantino a Best Original Screenplay Oscar for Django Unchained.

Anyway, in celebrating the success of Argo, how about a look at Jack Kirby’s original designs for the fictitious movie Lord of Light (which became Argo)? Kirby was a comic book legend, who created The Fantastic Four, The X-Men, Captain America, Thor and countless other iconic comic characters. In the seventies, Kirby had an ever heavier science-fiction bint, creating his wonderful Fourth World and The Eternals and O.M.A.C. As part of the operation to rescue the escaped diplomats, Kirby designed these storyboards for the movie, which actually hit upon several of the author and artist’s favourite themes – including advanced god-like beings and the merging of the rational with the mystical.

The International On-Line Film Critics’ Poll has just published the winners of their 2012 poll. I was honoured to take part, and I was very glad with most of the results. You can read the nominations here, but the winners are listed below. The superb Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was the biggest winner – winning Best Film, placing on the Top Ten Films, taking home Best Director, securing Best Actor for a very deserving Gary Oldman, along with Best Cast and Best Adapted Screenplay to boot. A host of other wonderful films (including The Master) did very well as well.

The nominees for the 2012 International On-Line Film Critics’ Poll 2012 have been announced. Open to all films released in the United States between November 2011 and November 2012, it allows for a slightly different playing field than the Oscars typically does. It also means that I am (as a non-American) far more likely to have seen all the nominees, with only Lincoln yet to see among the Best Picture nominees. Anyway, I will be sending in my ballot soon enough, but take a gander at the full list of nominees below. It’s a strong list, to be sure.

The wonderful folks at Mondo have produced a series of character posters for The Avengers. I’m a big fan of graphic design, and I love the stylised approach that they’ve taken to these characters. There’s apparently only a tiny number of them going on sale some time soon (with Hawkeye and Black Widow already sold out), so it might be worth keeping an eye out for the others on sale. They really are quite awesome.